Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Bad Habits Out

"The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones." -Somerset Maugham

I am like everyone else out there and have some bad habits. It doesn't matter what or which ones. All it means is that they are bad habits in my view and I need to continue working on ridding myself of them. But how does one go about getting rid of a bad personal habit?

There are many habits that we can easily get rid of. The difficulty though is that many habits have multiple aspects to them. This means that one thing will trigger an event that triggers the bad habit. I'm not trying to make this an overly difficult task (ridding yourself of a bad habit). But you need to considered changing other habits that support the one you are trying to get rid of.

Some good ways to find out if the habit you’re interested in removing has other aspects to it is to ask the following questions:

- What are the benefits of this habit?
- If I got rid of this habit, what would change?

A good example is smoking, which is a very social thing. Many people feel that it helps relax them. Additionally, they feel it is a good and nonthreatening way to meet people (“Got a light?”). If the smoking habit was gone, you would than have to find another way to meet people, relax, etc.

What it comes down to is seeing what the triggers are and understanding how to change those triggers. Change the triggers and you give yourself a fighting chance to rid the bad habit. And when you change those triggers, what else will change in your life? Other habits will probably cease to exist, leaving room for better things in life.

If you don't change, there are still consequences associated with the bad habit. Bad habits will tend to beget other bad habits, so on and so forth. The same is true for good habits in that better habits will be born of good habits.

Change is never easy and can be hard to sustain. I'm working on change, every day, evaluating and trying to understand myself. You can do the same and together we'll make our lives even better.